I'm sure you have heard about it, it is all over the news. This happened in my neck of the woods. Sea Tac International Airport last night at 8pm PST. Two F-15's out of Portland, OR were tasked to intercept. There's ATC audio between the suicidal pilot and ATC. It's tragic, incredible that no other loss of life occurred. Wow, just unbelievable. As reckless and dangerous as this was, a part of me just feels really sorry for the guy. By the sound of the ATC dialogue, he seemed like he wasn't a bad guy at all, just got caught up with whatever mounting mental/emotional issues he was dealing with. It seems clear he wasn't wanting to cause harm to anyone but himself (and well that multi-million-dollar airplane). It will be very interesting to find out how he was able to pull it off.
He made light of his experience (video games) but I have no doubt he knew enough about system procedures and flight experience to get the engines started, successfully takeoff and fly (even coordinated turns) for an hour. I have thousands of hours on flight simulators, some of which are extraordinarily sophisticated and realistic. I have no doubt I could at least start up, takeoff, fly and even land a full scale aircraft I had numerous flight hours with on the flight simulator. I would bet money he too was similarly experienced with flight simulators and most likely the Q400 specifically since that was the airplane he worked with on a daily basis for 3 years.
Here's but just one example of how to perform the start up sequence for the Q400 for FSX (Microsoft's Flight Simulator)...Real pilots use this type of software all of the time (FSX, Prepar3D, etc). You could literally memorize all of the processes and procedures from these simulators (and good quality payware). Although nothing can compare to true flying, the simulators can give you as realistic an experience as can be imagined. This might explain while he was able to execute barrel rolls, loops, coordinated turns, etc for over an hour before running out of fuel and plummeting to the ground where the plane crashed on a near vacant small island on Puget Sound.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/11/us/pl...off/index.html
https://komonews.com/news/local/stol...seatac-airport
He made light of his experience (video games) but I have no doubt he knew enough about system procedures and flight experience to get the engines started, successfully takeoff and fly (even coordinated turns) for an hour. I have thousands of hours on flight simulators, some of which are extraordinarily sophisticated and realistic. I have no doubt I could at least start up, takeoff, fly and even land a full scale aircraft I had numerous flight hours with on the flight simulator. I would bet money he too was similarly experienced with flight simulators and most likely the Q400 specifically since that was the airplane he worked with on a daily basis for 3 years.
Here's but just one example of how to perform the start up sequence for the Q400 for FSX (Microsoft's Flight Simulator)...Real pilots use this type of software all of the time (FSX, Prepar3D, etc). You could literally memorize all of the processes and procedures from these simulators (and good quality payware). Although nothing can compare to true flying, the simulators can give you as realistic an experience as can be imagined. This might explain while he was able to execute barrel rolls, loops, coordinated turns, etc for over an hour before running out of fuel and plummeting to the ground where the plane crashed on a near vacant small island on Puget Sound.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/11/us/pl...off/index.html
https://komonews.com/news/local/stol...seatac-airport
Comment